TELEVISION REVIEW

A Bad Face, Even if It's On Plagues

By GINA KOLATA

Published: April 19, 1997

For those who like blood and gore, for those who enjoy shivering over scary diseases ready to strike without notice, ''The Coming Plague,'' a two-part series on TBS, is actually kind of enjoyable. The series includes film clips of plagues past, like polio, complete with a toddler fitted with crutches and struggling to drag himself across a lawn. It also includes a truly creepy close-up of a face that starts with a few pimples and morphs into a decaying, pustule-ridden visage of a smallpox victim.

In Russia we see victims of diphtheria, a disease that should be long gone, and hear about how the bacteria elicit a leather-like skin to form over the throat, strangling the helpless patient. The film also shows victims of recently recognized viruses like Ebola, which causes profuse bleeding.

And what plague-centered history would be complete without AIDS? There it is, the AIDS quilt, and the AIDS patient who is finally responding to the new wonder drugs. But of course, we are not to forget the rest of the world, the series reminds us. Most people can't afford these drugs and are doomed to die after great suffering.

Throughout the series, the dire warnings assault us. AIDS ''is truly the greatest of all human plagues that ever struck.'' Ebola is contained for now, but what might happen if the virus mutates and spreads like the flu? The Black Death may have been controlled ''for more than 50 years,'' but remember ''it has never been conquered.'' Dengue fever? ''Only a matter of time before it finds its way to a Southern city.''

All right, it is gruesomely fascinating. But what, after all, is the point? Are we supposed to conclude that we are helpless against every known infectious disease? Yet as the makers of this documentary point out, many of the diseases they describe in loving detail are flourishing in third-world countries because of poor public health practices, not because we have no weapons against them.

And where did this notion come from that we have to have a drug treatment or a vaccine to control diseases? The lessons of history are otherwise. For example, public health measures alone managed to slash the death rate from tuberculosis by 57 percent in the last half of the 19th century, and yet there was no treatment for the disease before World War II. Measles deaths dropped by 82 percent before there was a vaccine. And so it went with all the major infectious diseases.

Finally, the series never answers the question that its own title raises. What is ''the coming plague''? Is it everything that ever decimated human populations in the past, or is it one of the new viruses found in recent years and so far contained? It can't be AIDS because that plague has already come.

Few would argue for complacency in the face of a plethora of microorganisms that can be deadly. But there is also the story of the boy who cried wolf. Exaggeration, in the end, can be worse than indifference.